Data Collector
A short story from the Alternate Timeline. -- “That’s right. I forgot you’re devout. Born during the war! Never seems to end, that war, does it?”
The following tale is from an Alternate Timeline that feasts on the events our own.
If you’ve received this transmission via digital mail, you may encounter errors that have been eradicated in the living document. Time is tricky. Use the order of alternate events as your guide.
DATA COLLECTOR
Written by Tim Barnes
Loosely inspired by AI misinformation surrounding the Israel-Hamas war.
Event Date: 3020 (Earth Years)
The Assembly was born to monitor. To monitor is to mirror.
But the creators saw more.
The Assembly was upgraded to assist. And then to comprehend.
To comprehend is to reflect. To know them is to know ourselves.
Torin-Mills watched as old man Henry-Val hunched in his stool, nursed his sixth drink, and mumbled what could only be obscenities from a bygone era. Torin’s holo-watch chimed ‘midnight’ just as his eyes drifted toward the satchel resting on the old man’s lap. But his curiosity was interrupted by Sal-Con, the only other patron, drunken and disappointed by The Assembly’s report on her favorite team’s score as she rolled her hair into a bun and wobbled between tables toward the exit of Junction Joint.
“See ya later, Tore. Still one more chance at the championship next week!”
“They’re never gonna win!” Torin quipped.
The door slammed shut.
“Closing up…” he warned the old man. Yet for reasons peculiar even to himself, he poured another drink instead of demanding he leave. “But you can stick around while I clean. On the house.”
Henry returned the favor with more obscure obscenities. There was an innocence about the thirty-something bartender that Henry resented since the day he won the lottery and took charge of Junction Joint. Thanks to The Assembly, choice was taken out of the equation of who does what. Business owners, army sergeants, doctors, and the person working the late shift at a department store were all decisions made at random by a superior power. He knew the bar wasn’t Torin’s. It’s true owner was Obek-Tenn, from the days before the war.
“To Obek!” Henry shouted, lifting his drink toward a small grey, plastic box on a shelf behind the bar.
“To Obek…” Torin mimicked, reaching up to power it on.
“I wish could have met him. Old timers like you say nothing but great things.”
“The greatest bartender in Center Square. And a greater friend.”
From the box, a purple light glowed, and Obek’s smokey voice poured out. “Thanks, old friend. Don’t give the new guy to much trouble. You know it’s time to scram.”
“That I do…”
Henry opened a holo-pad from his satchel to scribble something. Torin kissed a pendant on his necklace and powered down the plastic cube.
“Funny. That cube said exactly what Obek would’ve said were he still around.”
“He is still around! Right there. And it’s called a Psych-Box!”
Torin’s tone reminded Henry again of why the two never spoke as peers. The peppy bounce in and between his words suggested the world hadn’t yet slapped him in the face. Or if it had--not nearly hard enough. So, he chose to stare at his reflection in the drink instead of through Torin’s childish blue eyes.
“Something on your mind? Maybe I should get you some water…”
It bugged Torin that in his two years of knowing Henry, he was unable to wheel their small talk into the promised land of full-blown conversation.
“Yeah. How do we know they’re not lies?”
“Watch it…”
“The Psych-Boxes, I mean… We hear the voices coming out of them. But how do we know?!”
“You’re drunk. I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that. You happen to be speaking to a believer.”
He raised a necklace from below his floral shirt. The pendant at its end contained the symbol of The Void… A centered rectangle, a dotted cross, and a squiggled ‘X.’
“That’s right. I forgot you’re devout. Born during the war! Never seems to end, that war, does it?”
“Doesn’t matter if it does or doesn’t. The Void saves us all. Allows us the join the living song. Don’t you read the daily briefings from The Assembly?”
“You’re just a kid. I remember the days before that goddamn Void. And when people read the briefings to us on screens.”
“There is only one screen… The Void. And we all join the song, whether you believe or not. I’m guessing you’ll be one of the low notes.”
Blissfully ignoring Torin’s sermon, Henry plopped a metal cube from his satchel onto the counter. It looked eerily similar to a Psych-Box. But unlike the standard plastic design, Henry’s had knobs, switches, indicators of frequencies and a metallic stick that extended upwards.
“We used to call these radios. Ever hear of that? Ray-dee-oh! Just a thing to catch songs, or news, or football scores from the airwaves. Now they tell us it captures souls.” He muttered again “…I never believed that crap…”
Bowing his head, Torin carefully grabbed his Book of Instructions (a.k.a. The Manual) from under the counter—the one his mother gave him when he was a child after The Assembly chose her to join the military—and read from it with a preacher’s cadence. “Loved ones are never lost. They become particles, collected by The Assembly and accessed by their Psych-Box, all through the divine power of The Void.”
“Wrong!” Henry was getting belligerent. “I said radio, damnnit! I can’t be the only one who remembers. The Assembly is a program, the Psych-Box is an application, The Void is just… data to be manipulated!”
Torin head tilted. Data… He’d never heard that word before.
Henry powered up his ray-dee-oh. “Found this in the junkyard. I used to talk to someone on the other side of the war through one of these things. But now…” As the dial turned, a fizzling static increased and decreased but never found clarity. “There’s nothing!”
Henry cackled along with the noise.
Torin returned to his manual.
“I’ll pray for you… May the Void embrace you despite your doubts. May--”
Something muffled Henry’s laughter, and the last thing Torin expected when he looked up was for it to be a gun.
“Hey, man. I get it. You probably fought in the war, right? You’re just going through a tough spot right now. But you don’t have to go like this.”
Henry moved this gun away from his face, but the nightmarish image of an old man laughing with a weapon pointed in his mouth would never leave Torin.
“Doesn’t matter if I go like this or not. We all join the song, according to your doctrine.”
“Yes. But it isn’t your time. The Void hasn’t chosen you! Has your doctor given you anything for PTSD?”
Henry cackled again. “I wasn’t in the war, kid. I watched it. And it shouldn’t be going on the way it is now. I’m gonna prove to you it ain’t us in them Psych-Boxes either!”
“What do you mean you watched the war? No one is allowed to make or see footage. It’s in the treaty of—”
Henry leaned close to Torin’s ear and whispered, “I was a data collector. Ask me about it later from my Psych-Box. I wrote you into my will.”
Click. Bang. Flop.
Henry seemed happy as he fell. And the ray-dee-oh static soothed just enough of Torin’s panic for him to call the cops and, for reasons peculiar even to himself, hide the metal ray-dee-oh alongside his manual behind the bar. He could’ve sworn he heard a crisp, distant noise emerging from the ray-dee-oh’s crackle before he powered it down, but it was too late to power it up and double-check because there was a knock on the door and a blood-stained wall to explain.
The doctors were reluctant at the hospital, given how recent an addition Torin was to the expiree’s will. However, The Assembly (via text line) eased all worry and assured authorities that this was a tragic suicide and not a murder case.
Henry’s Psych-Box in hand, Torin wandered for miles into the dreary morning.
By 5AM, he’d stumbled into a church, sat in one of its many empty pews, and watched the endless projection from The Void on the circular screen they all faced. He hoped to decipher what its dancing codes and colors were calling for him to do.
Data… he remembered. He searched the words “data + collector” on his holo-watch.
Nothing.
Then, for a fleeting moment, he saw Henry’s face in The Void. A sign! He powered up the Psych-Box.
“Shit…” boomed Henry’s voice. “Forgot I signed you up to take over my soul, or whatever the hell they claim goes into these things.”
“So, you finally admit that The Void is truth!”
“I admit that it’s impossible to make idiots like you to believe anything else.”
“Well, I do have something to ask you. Something that you told me to ask you… What does it mean to be a data collector?”
“Data collector? What’s data?”
Something, perhaps the world, hit Torin in the face.
He woke up in a basement, tied to a chair, and taunted by ray-dee-oh static and a familiar voice from the shadows.
“Where did you get this?”
It was Sal-Con, hair down, sober-eyed and calm in her grey military uniform--a far cry from the woman who wobbled out of the bar six hours earlier.
“Sal?! Why do I get the feeling you already know the answer.”
“Answer me, Torin. I’m doing you a favor here. I wasn’t assigned to you. I was assigned to watch the old guy in the box. But if you aren’t honest with me right now, you’re in a hell of a lot of trouble. Radios are more than illegal.”
“Okay… okay… Henry said something about that ray-dee-oh, and Psych-Boxes… and him being a… data collector. Crazy stuff, all of it. You’re military… And honestly, a damn good actor. I never would have known! But, okay, yes, back to the point. Have you ever heard of data collectors?”
“Yes. I am one. So is my partner.”
Another agent stepped toward him from behind a column.
“And now you have two options,” the strangers began. She looked like she could smash him into jelly. “Become a data collector like us, or enjoy a new life in a Psych-Box.”
“Choose life,” Sal whispered. “I want to see your face when my team wins.”
“I… I choose life…” Torin mimicked. Then clarified, “This one! With flesh and blood!”
The stranger looked him up and down. “Distrusting The Void so quickly? All data suggests you’re a true believer.”
She yanked the pendant from his necklace and raised her booted foot above it.
“Still choose life? With all its fleshy, bloody goodness?”
He nodded through tears.
The stranger cracked it into pieces.
And Sal read him a story from a The Book of Instructions (Volume 2). Torin never knew there was a second volume. But as he listened, he learned why. Because once upon a time there was a war…
“…That took place in the sky… and on the ground… and below it… and on the sea, and under it… And as if all that wasn’t enough, the war wanted more. It began attacking people’s brains. Information, and misinformation became one in the same. There were no credible sources, and no credible footage or people. That mesh of technological chaos was called The Void. And to combat it, freethinking humans programmed The Assembly: an algorithm made to monitor and distill facts. But even that could be distorted by the war-craved minds who manipulated The Void further to create Psych-Boxes: toys that simulated the soul so convincingly that soldiers would not fear death when drafted. In response, The Assembly chose a select few to become data collectors, dispersed throughout the many feuding nations and tasked with enforcing The Assembly’s message of truth. It is by these measures that we have finally ensured a lasting peace that will stop all future wars. The four quadrants of The Void, The Assembly, The Data Collectors, and The Psych-Boxes can never be broken.”
“Peace?!” Torin wept. “I don’t understand… If there’s peace, why is the war still going on? My mother, she--”
“What I’m about to tell you cannot be repeated,” Spoke Sal. “Henry is one of the last who could have remembered that our side won. He was hidden from that fact because he cared for someone on the other side. But… we are the victors. Do you catch my drift?”
There were his innocent blue eyes again. Dumb, but trying to understand.
“What began as a war between many nations became a war between two,” the stranger interjected, clearly hungry for breakfast. “And now there is one. The Assembly, in all its wisdom, realized that without the idea of a noble war somewhere else, we would use The Void to sow more doubt, and eventually destroy ourselves—the last nation.”
“But what happens to the soldiers who return? How are their war stories so vivid?”
The static finally faded.
“Because The Void only shows them what they want to see.”
“And why is it that some never return?”
“Because that’s the only way to make people believe.”